pyqueryvsselectolax
PyQuery is a Python library for working with XML and HTML documents. It is similar to BeautifulSoup and is often used as a drop-in replacement for it.
PyQuery is inspired by javascript's jQuery and uses similar API allowing selecting of HTML nodes through CSS selectors. This makes it easy for developers who are already familiar with jQuery to use PyQuery in Python.
Unlike jQuery, PyQuery doesn't support XPath selectors and relies entirely on CSS selectors though offers similar HTML parsing features like selection of HTML elements, their attributes and text as well as html tree modification.
PyQuery also comes with a http client (through requests) so it can load and parse web URLs by itself.
selectolax is a fast and lightweight library for parsing HTML and XML documents in Python. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the popular BeautifulSoup library, with significantly faster performance.
selectolax uses a Cython-based parser to quickly parse and navigate through HTML and XML documents. It provides a simple and intuitive API for working with the document's structure, similar to BeautifulSoup.
To use selectolax, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install selectolax``.
Once it is installed, you can use theselectolax.html.fromstring()function to parse an HTML document and create a selectolax object.
For example:
selectolax.html.fromstring()from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html
with file-like objects, bytes or file paths,
as well asselectolax.xml.fromstring()`` for parsing XML documents.
Once you have a selectolax object, you can use the select() method to search for elements in the document using CSS selectors,
similar to BeautifulSoup. For example:
body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"
Like BeautifulSoups find and find_all methods selectolax also supports searching using the search()`` method, which returns the first matching element,
and thesearch_all()`` method, which returns all matching elements.
Highlights
Example Use
from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
# this is our HTML page:
html = """
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="product">
<h1>Product Title</h1>
<p>paragraph 1</p>
<p>paragraph2</p>
<span class="price">$10</span>
</div>
</body>
"""
doc = pq(html)
# we can use CSS selectors:
print(doc('#product .price').text())
"$10"
# it's also possible to modify HTML tree in various ways:
# insert text into selected element:
print(doc('h1').append('<span>discounted</span>'))
"<h1>Product Title<span>discounted</span></h1>"
# or remove elements
doc('p').remove()
print(doc('#product').html())
"""
<h1>Product Title<span>discounted</span></h1>
<span class="price">$10</span>
"""
# pyquery can also retrieve web documents using requests:
doc = pq(url='http://httpbin.org/html', headers={"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"})
print(doc('h1').html())
from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html
# use css selectors:
body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"
# find first matching element:
body = root.search("body")
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"
# or all matching elements:
html_string = "<html><body><p>paragraph1</p><p>paragraph2</p></body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
for el in root.search_all("p"):
print(el.text())
# will print:
# paragraph 1
# paragraph 2